Below are examples of syllabi I created for intermediate to advanced courses in modern and contemporary British literature and culture. They can be adapted for both undergraduate and graduate-level programs of study. Accordingly, the readings and viewings represent a range of possibilities for each unit, adjustable to the level and nature of the course.
Identity Crisis: A Survey of 20th-Century British Literature
This course introduces students to some of the key texts of post-1900 British and Anglophone literature. Under the rubric of "identity crisis," the readings, lectures, and class discussions explore the manner in which literature reflects and intervenes in periods of social, political, and cultural change. As it traces how Britain continually re-negotiates its own identity as a nation, this course presents the British experience as a correlative to the so-called "crisis" in the humanities, but in a way that emphasizes the productive and transformative implications of new technologies and shifting landscapes.
This course introduces students to some of the key texts of post-1900 British and Anglophone literature. Under the rubric of "identity crisis," the readings, lectures, and class discussions explore the manner in which literature reflects and intervenes in periods of social, political, and cultural change. As it traces how Britain continually re-negotiates its own identity as a nation, this course presents the British experience as a correlative to the so-called "crisis" in the humanities, but in a way that emphasizes the productive and transformative implications of new technologies and shifting landscapes.
| kaufman_identity_crisis_syllabus.pdf |
The Culture of Intrigue: Modernism and the National Security State
Drawing upon a wide range of novels, short stories, poems, and films, this course examines the agency of writers and texts in the machinations of the Anglo-American intelligence community from the First World War to the War on Terror. As we take into consideration both the literal recruitment of writers as spies and the artistic community's figural appropriation of the "secret agent," class discussions will focus on the way in which literature is weaponized in the interests of national security, only to become a liability or "breach" in its own right. Attending to the ethics of government leakage and the fine line between heroism and treason, The Culture of Intrigue repeats and interrogates the gesture of the secret state itself in treating modernism as a archetype for espionage—that is to say, as a training ground for the experience of encryption, alienation, and betrayal.
Drawing upon a wide range of novels, short stories, poems, and films, this course examines the agency of writers and texts in the machinations of the Anglo-American intelligence community from the First World War to the War on Terror. As we take into consideration both the literal recruitment of writers as spies and the artistic community's figural appropriation of the "secret agent," class discussions will focus on the way in which literature is weaponized in the interests of national security, only to become a liability or "breach" in its own right. Attending to the ethics of government leakage and the fine line between heroism and treason, The Culture of Intrigue repeats and interrogates the gesture of the secret state itself in treating modernism as a archetype for espionage—that is to say, as a training ground for the experience of encryption, alienation, and betrayal.
| kaufman_culture_of_intrigue_syllabus.pdf |
Medical Modernism: The Clinical Gaze in Literature, Art, and Science (Honors)
Abandoning the practice of medicine for that of poetry, John Keats glorified the poet as "a physician to all men." Less than a century later, another former medical student, James Joyce, characterized the modern writer as a vivisector, one who examines his subject by the unromantic "light of day." This transition, from humanistic healer to dispassionate observer, marks a paradigm shift in the evolution of the "clinical gaze," a way of seeing, knowing, and describing that simultaneously dehumanizes and offers a means of critically reflecting on the science of art (and vice versa). Using both verbal and visual texts, this course charts the genealogy of medical modernism, from the spiritual doctors of the Enlightenment; to the late nineteenth-century naturalists, for whom art was a “slice of life”; to the avant-garde painters, poets, novelists, and filmmakers of the twentieth century, who turned the scalpel on themselves, so to speak, in an effort to anatomize what Joyce called “the [aesthetic] instinct in action.”
Abandoning the practice of medicine for that of poetry, John Keats glorified the poet as "a physician to all men." Less than a century later, another former medical student, James Joyce, characterized the modern writer as a vivisector, one who examines his subject by the unromantic "light of day." This transition, from humanistic healer to dispassionate observer, marks a paradigm shift in the evolution of the "clinical gaze," a way of seeing, knowing, and describing that simultaneously dehumanizes and offers a means of critically reflecting on the science of art (and vice versa). Using both verbal and visual texts, this course charts the genealogy of medical modernism, from the spiritual doctors of the Enlightenment; to the late nineteenth-century naturalists, for whom art was a “slice of life”; to the avant-garde painters, poets, novelists, and filmmakers of the twentieth century, who turned the scalpel on themselves, so to speak, in an effort to anatomize what Joyce called “the [aesthetic] instinct in action.”
| kaufman_medical_modernism_syllabus.pdf |
A Modern Bestiary: The Animal in Literature and Philosophy (Graduate Seminar)
In his famous exercise in perspectivism, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens observes his feathered subject from multiple positions, each illustrating the unifying power of the poet’s imagination. Similarly, this thirteen-week course examines the figure of the animal in modern literature and thought from various angles, but in a manner that shifts the focus from the mind of the artist to the specificity of the living creature. Readings will include children’s stories, modernist novels and poems, and critical essays that problematize the “domestication” of non-human life as allegories for human concepts. Divided into three categories—“unnatural habitats” (ideological domains), “literary taxonomies” (representations of specific species), and “zoontologies” (philosophical perspectives)—class discussions will explore how the issues raised by such texts as Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Virginia Woolf’s Flush, and Giorgio Agamben’s The Open evince, in their own way, a crossbreeding of human and animal rights.
In his famous exercise in perspectivism, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens observes his feathered subject from multiple positions, each illustrating the unifying power of the poet’s imagination. Similarly, this thirteen-week course examines the figure of the animal in modern literature and thought from various angles, but in a manner that shifts the focus from the mind of the artist to the specificity of the living creature. Readings will include children’s stories, modernist novels and poems, and critical essays that problematize the “domestication” of non-human life as allegories for human concepts. Divided into three categories—“unnatural habitats” (ideological domains), “literary taxonomies” (representations of specific species), and “zoontologies” (philosophical perspectives)—class discussions will explore how the issues raised by such texts as Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Virginia Woolf’s Flush, and Giorgio Agamben’s The Open evince, in their own way, a crossbreeding of human and animal rights.
| kaufman_modern_bestiary_graduate_seminar.pdf |